On November 20th, President Obama announced Executive Action on Immigration that contains a broad range of fixes to the broken immigration system. These fixes will level the playing field for Americans and will allow immigrants to live free and up to their full potential so they can contribute to our great nation. Current rules harm both legal immigrant families and the U.S. economy, leading to severely reduced job mobility, personal hardships for families, an inability to start new businesses, and distortion in the labor market that negatively impacts both immigrants and American-born individuals. The extreme employment-based green card backlogs confronting families from certain countries and existing rules cause extreme hardship over many years and deprive the U.S. economy of the talents of these future Americans, many of whom are highly-skilled and educated in our best Universities.
“Today’s Executive Action brings a ray of hope to hundreds of thousands of tax-paying law-abiding skilled immigrants who want to start businesses in America but are otherwise beholden to their employers because of the long green card backlogs. President’s leadership will allow all legal immigrants to contribute the full measure of their talents to the U.S. economy” said Pratik Dakwala, Co-Founder and Director of Immigration Voice. “Great numbers of immigrant doctors, engineers, innovators, research scientists, and professors have so much to contribute to America. Until now, they faced severe quality of life issues for decades while they and their families await their green cards.”
“This is certainly a significant and extremely positive development,” said Immigration Voice Vice President Dheeraj Kohli. “The real solution is to fix the decades-long backlogs that continue to trap hundreds of thousands of employment-based immigrants and their families in a state of limbo. Although we hope that Congress will live up to its promise to address our nation’s priority issues, millions of people across the country will benefit from today’s Executive Action on Immigration.”
Group president Aman Kapoor said that “We applaud President Obama’s leadership on Executive Action on Immigration and we are looking forward to the speedy implementation of the fixes to the Immigration system.”
Find out more about Immigration Voice and the green card backlog at http://www.immigrationvoice.org
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Immigration Voice is a national grass-roots organization of legal, high-skilled immigrants living in the United States. The group has almost 100,000 members across the country and represents the interests of the nearly one million skilled immigrants and their family members caught in existing green card backlogs.
